Challenges of clinical education in health system

An obligation of medical sciences universities is to empower students. Relevant changes in country’s educational system are required to attain this goal. Obstacles on the way call for strategies to identify challenges and overcome them. The present article, thus, aims to describe and also explain a number of challenges posed in medical clinical training. This is a preliminary review article which has surveyed 38 related English and Persians articles published on clinical training in 1990-2003. The articles were retrieved by ProQuest, PubMed, Iranmedex, SID, and Elsevier databases. Only articles that dealt with the problems and challenges of clinical training were studied. Articles containing redundant content (320 cases) were excluded from the study. The present paper has discussed the importance of effective clinical training, and has explained and categorized the challenges posed to it. Challenges of nursing clinical training can be divided into micro challenges (at university level) and macro challenges (at national level) or into the challenges related to trainer, trainee, training program, or clinical setting. Examples of these challenges are presented in the text and their affectivity pattern has been drawn ini a causal model. Clinical training becomes part of the present condition after meeting micro and macro challenges posed in clinical settings. This condition may be good, moderate, or weak but never perfect.